OK, what the hell? I haven't had this happen since OS 9, where the Mac cursor just completely froze up, the keyboard stopped working--so couldn't try force-quitting anything--and I could do nothing but power down and force a restart.

Must have been some kind of cascading USB failure. When I lifted the Apple Pro Mouse, no red light... keyboard unresponsive. I tried unplugging and plugging it back into the computer, with no effect. A total pain in my ass.

I was in SAFARI when it happened. Navigated to the AOL homepage, when suddenly the cursor stalled over the web page and ceased to move.

Great.

Do you think the new keyboard could have played a role?

My MDD machine will loose contact with all USB ports due to a wake from sleep problem when I have something attached to a USB 2.0 PCI card that uses the port for power.

My keyboard and mouse go dead that are connected to the built in USB 1.1 port. Nothing short of a forced shut down and restart brings the machine back to life.

No idea. I hope not.

Hasn't happened again, haven't been able to recreate the issue. But it was weird. I keep chalking it up to the generally flaky behavior of the Mac OS. I don't get through a single day where I think the OS did its job amazingly well.

There's always some irritating behavior, like clicks that don't do anything, scrambled fonts, Aqua/window manager misdraws. Stuff where you go, hmmm that just ain't right. But you have no explanation about why the things happen. Might as well be gremlins. But there sure are more of them with OS X than there ever were in the old days.

Regarding the original question, my MDD has done this on occasion (complete system lockup), in both OS 9 and OS X. I'm not sure what causes it, but it hasn't happened in a long time so I haven't looked into it in depth. I've heard it said that bad memory can make this happen, but I don't know anything else about it.

Coincidentally, my Quadra 840AV started doing this a few weeks ago and completely died shortly after (it powers on, but no startup chime and no video). After some struggling with spare parts, I'm finally having a known-good replacement shipped over here, merging it with my dead Quadra, and getting back to work.

quote:

Originally posted by thalo:
There's always some irritating behavior, like clicks that don't do anything, scrambled fonts, Aqua/window manager misdraws. Stuff where you go, hmmm that just ain't right. But you have no explanation about why the things happen. Might as well be gremlins. But there sure are more of them with OS X than there ever were in the old days.

I've experienced all of these, but "clicks that don't do anything" has to be number one on the annoyance list. To throw one more on the pile, has anyone else had problems with windows refusing to deactivate when they're supposed to? I'll have an Omniweb window open, typically with a bunch of tabs, then I'll click the Desktop or another window, and my browser window just won't deactivate. I've even had weird limbo situations where two active windows display on the screen. Granted, my MDD is starting to get a little pokey, but this just isn't right.

I haven't had that one. Has anyone had "hanging drawers"? That's when some application window has stupid slide-out "drawers" (hate those with a passion)... you close the window, and the fucking DRAWER stays there, or a piece of it, and no way to close it. So you have to do some weird thing like go out of the app, come back, open a new window... open drawer... drag window and drawer over the old drawer, all kinds of shit to try and get rid of the hanging drawer.

Another one that I've been experiencing lately is WRONG CURSORS. Photoshop is the king of this, followed by Safari. Can't tell you how I love browsing with an i-beam, or trying to do Photoshop work with a cursor I can barely see, instead of the one I picked. Sometimes I even get invisible cursors, which was bug I think back in 10.1 that everyone thought was fixed.

Yeah, I've had those problems before.